Art in Review; Cecily Brown

Because it was a blend of pornographic imagery and Abstract Expressionist style that first brought Cecily Brown to the art world's attention, sensational things are expected of her. She disappoints by being merely good; and without overtly provocative imagery, her new, mostly abstract paintings, based mainly on landscape motifs, are less than thrilling.

To be sure, the paintings are visually engaging. The agitated, flickering all-over fabric of splintery and squiggly painterly gestures in nicely coordinated colors that range from earthy to acidic, and the hints of pastoral and sylvan spaces with occasionally legible details all effectively conspire to please the eye.

The problem is not, as some critics might say, that Ms. Brown is no Willem de Kooning. It is that you want her to deliver on her promise of a kind of gonzo expressionism, something brash and liberating. The way she buries imagery under all that suave brushwork makes you feel as if she is covering up something in herself. When she does go more legibly representational, as in "The Quarrel," it looks like a scene lifted from a Renaissance painting.

There is more than a whiff of the academic in her current work, which might not matter if she were a more elegant or canny stylist like, say, Sue Williams. All that said, there is still something likable about Ms. Brown's work; you want to cheer her on to more adventurous efforts. KEN JOHNSON

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A version of this review appears in print on February 11, 2005, on Page E00037 of the National edition with the headline: Art in Review; Cecily Brown. Order Reprints|Today's Paper|Subscribe